Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  One sunny afternoon toward the end of July 1846—probably on Thursday, July 23—Henry Thoreau walked into town from Walden Pond, intending to pick up a mended shoe. Toward sundown he crossed paths with Sam Staples, who was planning to step down as tax collector and needed to clear the books. Thoreau hadn’t paid since 1842, and ever since Staples had arrested Alcott and Lane back in ’43, he’d been nagging Henry about it. “Oh yes,” he recalled in old age, “I’d spoken to him a good many times about his tax and he said he didn’t believe in it and shouldn’t pay.” It was only the poll tax, a dollar and a half levied on every man from twenty on up, and Staples even offered to pay it for him. “But he said, ‘no sir; don’t you do it.’ Well I told him then that he’d have to pay it or else go to jail. ‘I’ll go now,’ says he. . . . ‘Well come along,’ says I and so I locked him up. He didn’t make any fuss, he took it all right.”70

  As Thoreau later recounted in “Civil Disobedience,”71 by then it was late, time to lock up. The prisoners had all been lounging in the prison yard, and as Sam led Henry to his upstairs cell, he could hear their footsteps echoing down the hollow rooms. He spent the evening chatting with his amiable cellmate, who’d accidentally burned down a barn when he fell asleep while smoking, and who was calmly awaiting trial while enjoying the clean whitewashed cell and the good cooking from the Middlesex Inn next door.72 Long after his cellmate went to bed, Henry lingered at the cell’s double-barred windows, watching the bustle in the tavern’s kitchen, listening to dishes rattling, the town clock tolling, and the voices in the street. Legend has it Emerson saw Thoreau at the bars and exclaimed, “Henry, why are you here!” to which Thoreau replied, “Mr. Emerson, why are you not here?”73 It couldn’t have happened that way: Henry’s cell was upstairs, and a ten-foot stone wall surmounted with iron pickets surrounded the jail. Yet the anecdote does reflect Thoreau’s thinking: “It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before.” The scales fell from his eyes; the more clearly he saw “the State in which I lived,” the more dismayed he grew. His friends and neighbors were good for “summer weather only,” too timid to risk themselves in the name of doing right. That he was in jail, and Emerson was not and never would be, crystallized perhaps the most important difference between them.74

  Sometime that evening, when Thoreau was still doing window duty, a lady in a veil knocked at Sam Staples’s door and handed over an envelope with the money to pay Thoreau’s back taxes. No one has ever been sure who it was—Sam was away, and his daughter Ellen, too young to pass along a name, answered the knock. Sam sometimes averred it was Samuel Hoar, who’d done the same for Alcott. The Thoreau family passed down a story of Cynthia descending in alarm on Aunts Maria and Jane Thoreau, who flew about gathering the cash, which Maria delivered to the Staples’ door “while the others waited near.” Scholars have long agreed it was probably Aunt Maria. What is certain is that it was late, and dark, and when Sam Staples got home and found the envelope, he saw no reason to rush things. So he waited until next morning after breakfast, and when he was letting the prisoners out for their daily work details, he told Thoreau he was free to go. “Oh he took it all right,” Staples told an interviewer in 1891; other times, though, he liked to embellish the story by laughing at how Henry was “mad as the devil” to have his gesture of protest undercut.75

  No doubt Thoreau was annoyed that, in his words, “some one interfered, and paid that tax,” but given that he’d seen the same thing done for both Alcott and Lane, he couldn’t have been surprised. What did surprise him was the sense of estrangement he felt when he came out of jail, as his neighbors “first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey.” Yet he went about his interrupted day as planned: picked up his mended shoe, then “joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct.” If it was a typical huckleberry party, Thoreau would have driven the hayrick himself, with children and servants laughing in the back and a few adults along to watch from the shade and pick berries off the loaded branches Thoreau brought them. So it was that in half an hour, he was on Fairhaven Hill, surrounded by children and the scent of huckleberries in the warm July sun, “and the State was nowhere to be seen.”76

  “This,” he concluded with a flourish, “is the whole history of ‘My Prisons.’”77 The arrest itself was trivial enough, as Thoreau well knew—the gravity of his account seems undercut by the folksy Sam Staples and his lounging fellow inmates. Yet the Middlesex County Jail was formidable: a three-story granite building, rebuilt and fortified since the Revolutionary War, when Thoreau’s Tory grand-uncle had broken out and escaped; and it housed its share of thieves and murderers. Unlike Alcott, Thoreau actually did do time, even if just overnight, allowing him to glimpse America’s carceral society from the “inside”; and if, like Alcott and Lane, his act of resistance was quietly neutralized by someone paying his taxes behind his back, both Alcott and Lane showed him what his next step needed to be. On the evening of his arrest and release, Alcott had sounded off at the lyceum, which, conveniently, had already gathered to hear a lecture on nonresistance; the very next day, Lane had sent a passionate defense of Alcott to the Liberator. Thoreau would use both approaches: first, speak out to his neighbors at the lyceum; then, publish an eloquent defense of his actions. However, it would take time. No one in town had taken the impractical Alcott or the eccentric Lane all that seriously, but Thoreau was one of Concord’s own sons, and they took him seriously indeed. He found himself unexpectedly exposed and vulnerable, the subject of heated controversy.

  He’d gotten the whole town talking. John S. Keyes voiced the standard view that Thoreau, Alcott, and Lane were “silly, would-be martyrs.” Dr. Bartlett’s fourteen-year-old son George, one of the lads who visited Thoreau at Walden, remembered how Thoreau sought counsel from his father the night of his release; it was like “seeing a Siberian exile.”78 The furious pages in Thoreau’s Journal suggest what he said that night—the problem lay not with frail humanity but with “institutions,” those “grim and ghostly phantoms like Moloch & Juggernaut because of the blind reverence paid to them.” How ironic that the State, which should protect his freedom, robbed him of it: “When I have asserted the freedom it declared it has imprisoned me.” About Staples himself, Thoreau was restrained: “The jailer or constable as a mere man and neighbor . . . may be a right worthy man.” The real question was, how could a good man lend himself to evil? Staples knew Thoreau acted out of principle, not poverty, yet still he locked him up, agreeing to be a tool of the State that was committing one of the worst crimes since time began, “the present Mexican War.” But who had committed this atrocity? All the people Thoreau saw around him were decent and well meaning. Yet daily the crime continued, unhindered. The lesson was, “Any can command him who doth not command himself.”79 Men were acting not like men, but like stones, letting themselves be used as bricks in a wall.

  As for Bronson Alcott, just weeks earlier Staples had threatened him, too: if Alcott didn’t pay up on his back taxes, he would advertise the Alcotts’ house, Hillside, for sale—hard words for the husband of Abigail Alcott and the father of four growing “little women.” Bronson fumed in his journal, in words echoing Thoreau’s: see how the State forces itself on the freeborn, even putting its hand right in your pocket “if it will, but I shall not put mine there on its behalf.” As soon as he could, Thoreau sought out Alcott, and they talked it over. No doubt Alcott passed along Emerson’s harsh judgment: when Alcott had defended Thoreau’s actions as “a dignified non-compliance with the injunction of civil powers,” Emerson scoffed. No, he argued back, what Thoreau did was “mean and skulking, and in bad taste.”80

  Emerson was hurt and confused. In the privacy of his journal, he struggled with his mounting anger. His first impulse was respect: “My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they [the rabble in Washington] could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce th
e war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax.” Ah, allegations of hypocrisy. As that sank in, Emerson realized that since he, too, paid that tax, Thoreau was accusing him. He prickled in self-defense. The State, that poor beast, meant well: “Do not refuse your pistareen.” It was all right for the abolitionists to refuse, for they were single-issue agitators and only sought to redress their one grievance; they “deserve to resist and go to prison in multitudes.” But not you, “you generalizers. You are not citizens.” “Don’t run amuck against the world.” As he wrote on, Emerson worked himself up from indignation to cutting insult: “But you, nothing will content. No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king & one subject, will appease you. Your objection then to the state of Massachusetts is deceptive. Your true quarrel is with the state of Man.” It was pointless to refuse payment—no, it was worse, hypocritical! The real hypocrite was Thoreau, not himself. “The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin & French & German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.” Emerson ended with unmasked contempt: Thoreau was no citizen. He did not deserve to go to war alongside true citizens “as their equals. . . . This prison is one step to suicide.”81

  Four days after Thoreau was jailed, a weary Emerson wrote the local news to Elizabeth Hoar. It was a sorry chronicle of disappointments and failures: “Mr Channing has returned, after spending 16 days in Rome; Mr Thoreau has spent a night in Concord jail on his refusal to pay his taxes; Mr Lane is in Concord endeavoring to sell his farm of ‘Fruitlands’; Mr E—but I spare you the rest of the weary history. It seems the very counting of threads in a beggar’s coat, to tell the chronicle of nothings . . . and it is out of this sad lint & rag fair that the web of lasting life is woven.”82 Nothing, absolutely nothing, would have astonished Emerson more than to learn that Thoreau’s act, which Emerson wrote off with such loathing, would be honored as the torch whose light would lead a hundred peaceful revolutions that still shape, and shake, the world.

  · · ·

  Only time would tell the meaning of Thoreau’s night in jail. For the time being, he kept his thoughts to himself. As for his Concord neighbors, two further acts of resistance seemed to them more consequential. Two years before, Thoreau had returned from his long walk across the state in time to ring the bell for Concord’s first great antislavery gala. On August 1, 1846, just a week after his night in jail, Thoreau hosted the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society’s second gala celebration, again in honor of West Indian Emancipation. One of the event’s organizers—probably the brave and outspoken Anna Whiting, Thoreau’s Concord Academy classmate—wrote excitedly to the Liberator, “I think this the best celebration ever had any where.” The weather was perfect, cooled by a few morning clouds, and Thoreau’s grove in the woods “seemed the best of all groves. We had seats enough and to spare, plenty to eat, and a hogshead of good ice-water to drink.”83

  They also had a full slate of speakers, who stepped one by one to the open doorway of Thoreau’s house and addressed the crowd. William Henry Channing, whom Thoreau had met in New York, solemnly announced that his doomsaying prophecies of the year before had come true. The calm and philosophical Emerson spoke, too, “closely scrutinizing, nicely adjusting the scales, so that there should be not a hair too much in the one scale or the other, telling us the need be of all things.” Lewis Hayden, the escaped slave from Kentucky, “stammer[ed] out touchingly that which none has power fully to utter, what a glorious thing liberty is.” Bronson Alcott was invited to defend Thoreau’s arrest, but he turned down the invitation to tend to his garden instead, leaving Thoreau without his closest ally. As for Thoreau, he said not one recorded word, nor did he mention the event in his Journal, though he did mention it obliquely in Walden: “It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.”84 Thoreau, watching the long-planned gala unfold on his doorstep, felt very far away.

  At “twenty-five or thirty,” the numbers were small. Radical abolitionism was still the work of a tiny minority fighting a hard uphill battle against hostility and indifference.85 No doubt, mocked Whiting, Concord’s people are all obliged to stay home, “being so busy in providing for the wants of their new sister Texas, and her interminable offspring.” Nor do they mean, she added with a nod to their silent host, “to repudiate any of their debts, but are willing to pay the last farthing.” Least of all, she sallied on, could Concord people allow themselves, in these new times, a celebration of “that sacred word liberty.” Shout it as loud as you can in their ears, they but “give you a look, very similar to that of some superannuated person, from whose mind the memory of all those formerly dear has passed away.” But at least it was a diverse turnout: “a handsome sprinkling of women and children,” plus “a very few farmers,” about as many mechanics, “one merchant, one lawyer, two physicians” (which almost certainly included the sympathetic Dr. Bartlett), plus the ministers. The day’s events ended with a choral concert, which, Whiting closed, was “excellent.”86

  As the music died away through the woods and the attendees packed up the leftovers, Thoreau must have pondered the length, breadth, and depth of character of each person there, not least his own. From his own doorway, the full spectrum of abolitionist positions and personalities had spoken, from Garrisonian disunionists to Emerson’s balanced moderation to the raw pain in Hayden’s stammering voice, recalling his first wife and firstborn child dragging out their lives “on some tyrant’s plantation . . . driven all day under the lash, and then at night to be under the will of any demon or deacon that has a white face. How long shall these things be?” How long indeed? No one there—least of all Thoreau—was clear whether being jailed for nonpayment of a tax could be anything more than pointless martyrdom, irresponsible dereliction, or vulgar flirtation with criminality.87 What was his one easy night in jail compared with Lewis Hayden’s life of brutal abuse under the Southern lash? Could W. H. Channing’s “No Union” platform or Alcott’s “No Government” nonresistance keep the lash off Hayden’s back? Emerson warned that extremists unbalanced the delicate scales of “need be,” and now the whole town had heard his patronizing dismissal. Mean and skulking? Thoreau stood by his actions, but his emotions were raw and his mind was in turmoil. Before he could speak, he had to measure his thoughts, carefully and deliberately. What was bedrock here, what was “reality”? He would simmer for eighteen months before facing his fellow citizens from the podium with an epochal defense of resistance against civil government.

  Lewis Hayden was the first documented fugitive slave to visit Thoreau at Walden. There may have been others: Cynthia Thoreau’s household served as a secure station on the Underground Railroad, one of several in town, and Henry regularly escorted escaping slaves to the northbound train, bought them tickets, ensured they had money, and either boarded with them at Concord (sitting at a distance, keeping guard) or drove them to the whistle-stop at West Fitchburg. The legend long persisted that his Walden house was a place of refuge, which is absurd: it lacked both lock and hiding place. But reliable participants recalled escaping slaves being brought there for Thoreau to look after until dark, when he would escort them to Cynthia’s house or another safe shelter.88 No documentation was kept—it was, after all, underground, illegal, even treasonable—but, very rarely, private journals recorded particular incidents. Late in 1846, Abigail Alcott recorded the arrival of “John,” “an amiable and intelligent man just 7 weeks from the ‘House of Bondage’” in Maryland. Bronson Alcott recorded a few details of John’s two-week stay at Hillside, where he sawed and stacked firewood, relishing his first taste of freedom and providing “image and a name to the dire entity of slavery, and was an impressive lesson to my children, bringing before them the wrongs of the black man.” That second winter, Bronson usually spent Sunday evenings at Walden with Henry, who recalled i
n Walden “one real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the northstar.” Perhaps this was John, by Bronson’s account “athletic, dexterous, sagacious, and self-relying,” joining the friends one Sunday evening on Henry’s third chair.89

  Jack Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lewis Hayden, perhaps “John,” and how many unnamed others? As Thoreau wrote on, the empty cellar holes of the ruined houses around him came to stand for the emptied dreams of a lost generation. In the quiet of Walden Woods, Thoreau meditated on a new irony: a rising American generation could realize their own dreams of independence only by passage out of America, toward the North Star.

  Going to Extremes II: Thoreau on Katahdin

  “Thoreau’s is a walking Muse,” wrote Alcott about this time, “winged at the anklets and rhyming her steps. The ruddiest and nimblest genius that has trodden our woods, he comes amidst mists and exhalations, his locks dripping with moisture, in the sonorous rains of an ever-lyric day.” For a year, Thoreau’s walking muse led him around the widening circles of Walden. “Who knows who his neighbors are,” he wrote that first summer. “We seem to lead our human lives amid a concentric system of worlds of realm on realm, close bordering on each other—where dwell the unknown and the imagined races—as various in degree as our own thoughts are.” Now it was time to enlarge his circles beyond Walden. Maine had been in the back of his mind since May 1838, when he went looking for a teaching position and found an Indian pointing up the Penobscot, saying, “Two or three miles up the river one beautiful country!”90 The Penobscot were familiar to Thoreau, for groups still came south to camp on the Concord River and make baskets to sell; “Penobscots by the river are my Britons come to Rome,” he’d written years before.91 It was time the Roman made a trip north.